His for Hello! Happy New Year! and The Holdovers.
Starting off 2024 with the news that my score for director Alexander Payne’s new feature, THE HOLDOVERS, has been short-listed for the Oscar for Best Original Score. It was great to reunite with Alexander on our first project since NEBRASKA, and a true pleasure to compose music for such a fantastic film. It’s been securing nominations and wins right and left in the last several weeks, including 3 Golden Globe nominations and 8 from the Critic’s Choice Awards, and has won Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Screenplay from The Boston Critics Circle.
Much of the film is shot in Western Massachusetts, just a few miles from where I used to live near Amherst. I found easy inspiration scoring the driving montages with the characters traveling the same New England country roads that I drove all over in my 20’s. For the songier side of my score, it was fun to explore an early 70’s rock and folk-rock sound – this was music I grew up hearing on my older brother’s turntable and covered in my first bands.
Richard Ford and I produced the score together, and we co-produced the soundtrack album which is out now. It’s available either through the usual streamers or as a deluxe double LP (that includes the fantastic source-score as well – including songs by everyone from Cat Stevens and The Allman Bros. to Artie Shaw and The Swingle Singers). Alexander helped put together the artwork and contributed some great liner notes for it.
I attended premieres and screenings at The Toronto International Film Festival and in Los Angeles at The Academy Museum Theater. Here in Portland, I put on a live performance of selections from the score before a screening of the film at The Hollywood Theatre.
“There’s a great theme that runs through filmmaker Alexander Payne’s work that finds curmudgeons bonding on the road, a voyage that takes at first-unlikeable male characters on a trip that would give Odysseus pause, dropping them off at the end of California vineyards, rural America and now Boston preppie-college central, leaving the characters just a bit wiser and more likeable than when we first found them. For Mark Orton, it was the acoustically folksy music of the acclaimed indie-alt. group Tin Hat that caught Payne’s sight as he drove a bickering son and father from Montana to “Nebraska.” Lucky for us, Orton is back in Payne’s company again for both career bests with “The Holdovers,” a film and score that fits their eccentric-enabling talents to a tee. Definitely not in Nebraska anymore, Orton shows his period-centric chops in any number of styles, with soulful blues guitar and brass echoing Cat Stevens, intimate jazz bringing to mind a Charlie Brown Christmas and sardonic sleigh bells for Giamatti’s patented bug outs. While strumming chords and accordion bring to mind Orton’s Tin Hat, a boy’s chorus echoes a college-bound institution haunted by war-fallen graduates, while lyrical piano melody becomes the regret of a life hidden from in academia. As ironic as it is poignant, Orton’s “Holdovers” evokes sad sack smart people we’ll come to empathize with in an understated, emotionally impactful way. It’s a triumph of understated, literate dramedy in all respects with a fine sense of time, place and an ultimately quite moving heart, especially in Orton’s musical roads uniquely travelled, once again in particularly excellent company.”
– ON THE SCORE: THE BEST SCORES OF 2023
NOW STREAMING:
In other news, I thought I’d simply share some recent projects that are out now for your streaming pleasure. This includes two newer series I scored for Netflix: Obama’s WORKING: What We Do All Day, and MUSCLES & MAYHEM: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators. Ray Romano’s directorial debut, SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS, is available now (the soundtrack is released by Lionsgate) as is LEAVE NO TRACE, the documentary that investigates a century-long cover-up exposing the failure of the Boy Scouts of America to protect their young scouts.
PODCASTS:
I’ve got a number of award winning podcasts available as well including two from Apple (PROJECT UNABOMB and THE LINE), two from The Headlong Series (SURVIVING Y2K and RUNNING FROM COPS), and of course the perennial favorite WINDS OF CHANGE, that takes on whether a certain iconic rock ballad from The Scorpions might in fact have a CIA origin story.
